Sexual Inhibitions
A common dream that deals with sexual inhibitions is one in which one or both of your parents walk in on you while you are making love. In such a dream, your parent may talk to you as if there is nothing unusual about his or her appearance in your bedroom. An important aspect of a dream like this is the identity of your partner. If it's your spouse, consider whether your parents approve of your spouse or whether you feel a need for such approval. But there are also other scenarios, like the one that follows. The title of this dream is “Parents and Sex Dreams”:
In the dream, I'm making love with this attractive guy who works in my office. Everything is going great until I see my mother standing over the bed. I jerk the sheet over my lover, and I demand to know what she's doing in my bedroom. She doesn't answer, but she has a disapproving expression on her face. She simply turns and marches out of the room.
For Julie, the dreamer, this scene was easy to interpret. She found the man attractive and liked being around him. But she also loved her husband and in her waking life wouldn't have gotten involved with another man. Her mother's appearance suggested to her that she felt guilty about her attraction to her coworker.
“If you find yourself enjoying sex in a dream in circumstances your waking mind finds shocking, this is a sure sign that you are imposing a lifestyle on yourself which is at variance with your natural feelings in some way, and your dream is a warning to change it,” says Ann Faraday in The Dream Game.
Pay attention to others’ reactions to your actions in your dream. Though these reactions seem to be coming from other people, they actually signify how you feel about yourself. Change your behavior accordingly, and you'll stop having anxiety dreams of this nature.
Faraday concludes, “The most important thing … is to become aware of one's own feelings, thereby avoiding the danger of the repressed impulses seeking expression in some devious way, perhaps by outbursts of anger against one's partner or by ‘accidentally’ finding oneself in some compromising situation with the dream lover in waking life.”
